Registration Act

What is the point of super registration acts in comics and if the superheroes are the ones usually affected by it what happens to the supervillians?

Don't forget the relevant article: Super Registration Act.

In Marvel, the point was to sell comics by inventing a flimsy excuse for superheroes to fight one another.

Aside from adding another law they've violated, I don't see how it would affect them much. Given the villain part of their title, they probably don't care much about that. The proper way to deal with supervillains is to build prisons that can actually hold them, or find a way to neutralize their powers. Or kill them, if the crime is serious enough.

Supervillains aren't affected, because they pretty much are already registered. Law enforcement doesn't files their records under their criminal nick name.

Honestly, the point of an SHRA is to level the playing field for "normals" who feel insecure about "supers". Mark Millar justified Civil War by saying "how would you feel if you lived next to someone who could, at any time, decide to blow the walls off your house, murder you and you whole family, and get away without a shred of evidence?" Thus, the SHRA would exist to moderate who was allowed to have superpowers and why, along with how they're permitted to use those powers in the context of mundane society. Comic books are notoriously slow for having everyday law failing to catch up with the reality of costumed, superpowered vigilantes. For example, criminals go scott-free because Batman isn't recognized as a law-enforcement authority and She Hulk has had to fight cases in which precedent was completely invalidated by the presence of superpowers.

Now, as for how this affects supervillains, well it pretty much exists to more easily define what a "supervillain" is by lowering the bar for what it takes to be one. The perfect example is Luke Cage and the Secret Avengers. Luke Cage wanted to do nothing but wait inside his house and not bother anybody when the SHRA went into law at midnight, but he was branded a renegade (i.e., "supervillain") for resisting arrest.

I have other points I could make about why SHRA will always fail in comics:

1. It makes pandering to normals, rather than empowering supers, the focus of a superhero story, which NEVER works out in the long run.

2. It unromanticizes costumed heroes in general. They become government lackeys, tools, or worse.

3. And it assumes that Power Creep, Power Seep never happens. What's the point of, say, having Spider-man explain the limits of his powers if, a few months/years down the road, he's got new/greater powers than he said before?

edited 26th Feb '11 8:51:10 AM by KingZeal

Has there ever been an incarnation of Super Registration that wasn't either trivial to the point of unimportance, or epically racist and totalitarian in its execution?

Yeah. In the Marvel U, Canada registers all their superheroes and it works out just fine. (Probably because there's only, like, 15 of them.)

In the backstory of The Incredibles, all the superheroes were already registered during the Golden Age. The government had files on all the supers with their powers and secret identities. This allowed the supers to do their thing with the government's approval, and the government even offered logistical support (such as sending MIBs to suppress any information about the supers' secret identities).

The problem with any Super Registration Act is the fact that it never ever addresses the fact that the government has no control over the supervillains. If the government cannot control the villains, they cannot control the heroes either. I do not even think it works in The Incredibles even though it perfectly justifies the Super Registration Act, as the backstory cannot happen since logically Mr. Incredible would be akin to a police officer.

edited 26th Feb '11 1:36:41 PM by GameGuruGG

The Super Registration Act always bugs me, mainly because comic writers can't seem to think of ways to handle it without making it evil. Generally, such Acts are written in ways that are harmful to the superhero community. But the act of making supers register isn't inherently evil or destructive to individual liberty- it's usually what comes next that is (see Marvel's 'draft all supers into a paramilitary organization and have them hunt down unregistered supers'). Can't we have a story where a SRA is actually beneficial or something? I would site The Incredibles, but it wasn't originally a comic book.

They're always used as Anvilicious takes on Mc Carthyism or the Patriot Act, so why not have a story using it as an analogue to something less tyrannical, like the Americans With Disabilities Act? I'm using the latter as an example due to my own personal experience gained from that Act.

To me, it seems like the way to make a Registration Act work is the same as the way to make industry reform work. You don't tell them what to do or punish them for doing things against your plan, you incentivize the way you want them to do things and leave the other way alone. So like The Incredibles history, or like Marvel's SHRA minus the parts about conscription and liability (remember, vigilantism is technically already illegal, so a clause that unregistered heroes will be arrested is merely redundant as long as you're not making registered heroes hunt them down). Consider masked heroism a private enterprise, a business with which you can negotiate. Then, negotiate.

"Now, as for how this affects supervillains, well it pretty much exists to more easily define what a "supervillain" is by lowering the bar for what it takes to be one. The perfect example is Luke Cage and the Secret Avengers. Luke Cage wanted to do nothing but wait inside his house and not bother anybody when the SHRA went into law at midnight, but he was branded a renegade (i.e., "supervillain") for resisting arrest. "

One dumb thing about Civil War was that writers had no idea how SHRA is supposed to work. So while this thing with Cage happened, Firestar has do the same thing - just stopped running around as superhero and nobody bothered her at all.

Agreed, mostly. I wouldn't outlaw *all* non-sanctioned crimefighting. Rather, I'd take measures to give advantages to those super heroes who formally register with sanctioning authorities. Things like limited police powers, the ability to testify masked in court, stuff like that.

Non-heroic superhumans really shouldn't have to register with anybody at all, though "metapower use" would be relevant information for, say, business licensing. One might argue that certain super powers could be so dangerous as to require registration, but the solution there is government provided *medical aid* to metapowered individuals with dangerous or uncontrolled powers. You don't really need special registration laws to be able to deal with, say, a 13 year old kid who started exploding every 90 minutes; public health covers it fine. . .*for that kid*. And the government providing training and care would be good policy anyway, for encouraging superhumans to live and work in the US.

As for guys like Thor or Reed Richards, there is a point where the federal government should accept that they should treat certain individuals more as national security issues, to carefully and diplomatically negotiate proper agreements with. Or, "Don't antagonize somebody who can blow a hole in the continent unless you absolutely must."

Like I said a long while back, incentives are the way to go.

Superheroes are, in a nutshell, modern day feudal knights. In the olden days, lords (officials) did not have the power or resources to fight or police their own property, so they officially entered a mutually-beneficial partnership with knights, who received land and title from the lord but was official self-sufficient in how they went about policing/protecting their sovereignty. In a world with superheroes, it's largely the same: unless the people above the supers are MORE super, there's no way to stop them from doing whatever they want, but since that still leaves supers in charge, that only exacerbates the problem.

The ONLY way modern system of militarization would work, is if every superpower can be removed and/or granted at will. Like I said before, though, you can't make Superman stop being kryptonian. Even if you hit him with gold kryptonite (which takes his powers away permanently), you still run the risk that some other X factor could restore the powers brought upon by his genes.

Here's one way to get superheroes to accept government oversight: start paying them! People who risk their lives saving the world from incredible threats should not have to hold down a second job as well.

Heh. I said THAT in a previous discussion as well.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=g9va2kxnc9k3dy35bvd0bj0m&page=17

edited 27th Feb '11 6:58:15 AM by KingZeal

So there's never been a good verison of a registration act presented or at least a not so evil version of it. Also thanks for the answers cause the main reason I asked this question is because in the DCU. A registration act was created which caused the J.S.A to disband so I was kind of curious about what happened to all the bad guys. Also why was there a 50 to 60 year gap after the JSA disappears and Superman/Batman appears? Where did all the other super heroes and villians went to?

^I think the canon time between the JSA disbanding and Superman showing up is much shorter than that.

Probably not. The sliding timescale always has Superman starting his career "10 years ago".

That would be 2001 nowadays.

Damn sliding time scale, messin' up my reckonin' :P

No no no you're wrong. Canada registers all its supers so it can weed out the ones they want to use for experiments and monster creation, the Alpha Flight Super Hero team is just to keep a good eye with the public and distract them from the real work, abominations like Wolverine, Sabertooth, Cyber, Lady Death Strike, X-23 and Deadpool.

Canada was the most evil country in Marvel world after Russia and Dr. Doom land. The Civil War's real purpose was to help the United States catch up, because seriously, Canada? A freaking democratic socialist state violates more freedoms for the sake of mutant super soldiers than the richest, most powerful capitalistic social Darwinists under the sun? Please. Civil War was about making Marvel world more believable, they just failed to tell a good story that didn't derail their good books.

edited 15th Aug '11 9:38:20 PM by Cider

No one has answered my question about the JSA.

There are no comics about that period, nobody knows.

Oh great that totally sucks but thanks for the answers anyway.